Notes

Foreword

  1.  Louis Althusser, “Freud and Lacan” (1964–1965, “Freud et Lacan,” La nouvelle Critique, nos. 161–62), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 195–220.

  2.  See for instance Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences (Les mots et les choses, 1966) (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002).

  3.  Louis Althusser, “Philosophie et sciences humaines,” Revue de l’enseignement philosophique 13, no. 5 (June-July 1963). The article was reedited in French in Solitude de Machiavel et autres textes, ed. Yves Sintomer (Paris: PUF, 1998), pp. 43–58.

  4.  See, for instance, the Rome Discourse (1953).

  5.  Michel Foucault, “Foreword,” in Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. C. R. Fawcett (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), p. 1.

  6.  Georges Canguilhem, “Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 1958. The article was republished in Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences concernant les vivants et la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1994), pp. 365–81.

  7.  Cf. Jacques Lacan’s paper entitled The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious (1960).

  8.  Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’Etat (La Pensée, 1970). English edition: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (IISA), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

  9.  Cf. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 2005), part 7, 4, p. 232.

 10. Ibid., p. 231.

 11. Cf. IISA, pp. 170–82.

 12. Cf. Lacan’s seminar 2, “The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis” (1954–1955).

 13. Cf Foucault, The Order of Things, ch. 10, 5, “Psychoanalysis and Ethnology,” pp. 407–11. According to Foucault, psychoanalysis, with the concept of the unconscious, introduces a “principle of dissatisfaction” within the field of the human sciences.

Editors’ Preface

  1.  Cf. our presentation of Louis Althusser’s Écrits sur la psychanalyse: Freud et Lacan (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1983, Le Livre de Poche, 1995); cf. also Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée (Paris: Fayard, 1993).

  2.  The recording of this speech and all the documents quoted in this edition are in Althusser’s archives and can be consulted at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC).

  3.  “Freud et Lacan,” La Nouvelle Critique (December 1964-January 1965), rpt. in Althusser, Écrits sur la psychanalyse.

  4.  This chronology is based on a double set of manuscript notes taken by members of the audience, Althusser’s notes preserved in his archives, and Étienne Balibar’s notes, which he desposited at the IMEC. Althusser’s archives also contain the recordings of the following presentations: Althusser’s second presentation (almost complete), complete presentations by Étienne Balibar and Jacques-Alain Miller, and Michel Tort’s presentation (short fragment). These recordings also contain, following the presentations, a certain number of discussions in which Althusser played an important part.

1. The Place of Psychoanalysis in the Human Sciences

  1.  A founding member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris, Angelo Hesnard was the author, with Emmanuel Regis, of the first book on psychoanalysis published in France: La Psychanalyse des névroses et des psychoses, ses applications médicales et extra-médicales (Paris: Alcan, 1914). His book, L’oeuvre de Freud (Paris: Payot, 1960) included a preface by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He died in 1969.

  2.  In the absence of any other source, we follow here the text of the transcription.

  3.  Roland Dalbiez was the author of a book that was famous in its time: La Méthode psychanalytique freudienne (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936). It sought to separate psychoanalytic technique, which he regarded as innovative, from Freudian doctrine, which he regarded as a confused philosophy. He had considerable influence: one of his students was Paul Ricoeur.

  4.  Althusser is referring essentially to Georges Politzer’s Critique des fondements de la psychologie (Paris: Rieder, 1928). An exchange of letters with Guy Besse, then director of Éditions Sociales, shows that in June 1955 Althusser planned to republish Politzer’s work, preceded by a “theoretical preface,” in the future Theorie series. Learning from Guy Besse that Presses Universitaires de France was planning to publish the text “simply accompanied by a biographical note,” Althusser wrote to him, for example, on June 23, 1965:

Is it really too late to try to resume the project? I’m talking to you about it again for a reason whose gravity cannot be overestimated, namely: Politzer’s text, put before the public without a theoretical preface that every reader would be obliged to read is going to cause great damage. Even if we publish elsewhere, and in time, a theoretical-critical text on the Critique of Foundations, how many readers of the Critique will read our text? They will launch into the Critique, and the results will be, we can safely predict, disastrous. The Critique is a brilliant text, but it is wrong, and profoundly idealist. His genius is to have understood Freud’s crucial importance at a time when it was suspected by almost no one in France—his mistake was to have given an exposition and critique of it that was 100% idealist, and very precisely existentialist. It was not by wrongly interpreting Politzer that Sartre and Merleau used it in the way we know: it was, unfortunately, by correctly interpreting Politzer: Sartre’s only teacher is Politzer, his only true teacher (with… as paradoxical as it may seem, Bergson! In his work the influence of Husserl is much more superficial, despite his numerous terminological borrowings from him).

Politzer’s book was finally republished by PUF in 1967.

 

  5.  “Lacan’s society” is the Société française de psychanalyse, founded by Daniel Lagache in June 1953; the “old one” is the Société psychanalytique de Paris; created in 1926, it was then headed by Sacha Nacht.

  6.  Two issues of the Revue de psychologie concrète were in fact published in 1929.

  7.  This seems to refer to the report delivered by Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire to the Bonneval colloquium. Althusser had an unsigned offprint of this report: J. Laplanche and S. Leclaire: “L’inconscient. Une étude psychanalytique,” Les Temps modernes, July 1961.

  8.  The transcript, which is probably in conformity with what Althusser said, gives psychanalyse (psychoanalysis). However, it is likely that Althusser meant psychologie concrète.

  9.  The transcript and the listener’s notes give sociologie. However, we can assume that Althusser meant to say psychologie here.

 10. Analyzed by Freud, Abram Kardiner was one of the representatives of the “culturalist” trend. See, for example, The Individual and His Society: The Psychodynamics of Primitive Social Organization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), and My Analysis with Freud: Reminiscences (New York: Norton, 1977).

 11. In fact, he was Viennese in origin. Before emigrating to the United States, René Spitz took an active part in the Société psychanalytique de Paris. He is famous for his works on the observation of infants and on “hospitalism.” See, for example, The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York: International Universities Press, 1965).

 12. Here Althusser is referring to the article “Comment se développe la notion de corps propre chez l’enfant,” Journal de Psychologie (November-December 1931), in which Henri Wallon develops the idea of the “trial of the mirror”; the article was republished in his book Les Origines du caractère chez l’enfant (Paris: Bovin, 1934). In 1936 Jacques Lacan presented his own conception of the “mirror stage” at the Marienbad Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Most of this text, which had not been published, was incorporated in 1938 into Lacan’s contribution to volume 8 of L’Encyclopédie française, which was edited by Wallon (“La Famille”). When in July 1949 he gave his famous talk on the “mirror stage” at the Zurich Congress (“La stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,” republished in his Écrits [Paris: PUF, 1985], pp. 93–100) Lacan in fact omitted any reference to Wallon.

 13. The transcript reads sociologie. Althusser may have meant to say société.

 14. According to Descartes, the “pineal gland” is the point in the brain where the “most peculiar union of the soul with part of the body” takes place.

 15. Without naming her, Lacan calls Melanie Klein a “tripe butcher and brilliant woman.” Lacan, Écrits.

 16. Anna Freud, Mécanisme de défense du moi, 11th ed. (Paris: PUF, 1985) and La Psychanalyse des enfants, 4th ed. (Paris: PUF, 1981).

 17. A representative of “American neo-Freudianism,” Franz Alexander founded the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1931. See for example his Psychosomatic Medicine: Its Principles and Applications, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1987).

 18. This was a colloquium held at Bonneval from October 30 to November 2, 1960. Acta published in the VIe colloque de Bonneval: l’inconscient (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966).

 19. A classmate of Lacan’s at Sainte-Anne and his friend, Henri Ey succeeded René Laforgue as leader of the L’évolution psychiatrique group, seeking to organize a confrontation between psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In 1933 he took charge of the psychiatric hospital at Bonneval, which he did not leave until 1970.

 20. J. H. Jackson (1835–1911): a British neurologist, famous in particular for his works on epilepsy and aphasia and more generally for his research on the relations between thought and the brain. Henri Ey is often considered one of the principal representatives of the “neo-Jacksonian” current in psychiatry.

 21. For details, see Élisabeth Roudinesco, La Bataille de cent ans: Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp. 317–28; and Jacques Lacan, Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée (Paris: Fayard, 1993), pp. 383–403.

 22. The transcript gives only “mon maître J.”

 23. A member of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society since 1908, Ludwig Binswanger directed the Bellevue Sanatorium in Switzerland from 1911 to 1956. Strongly influenced by phenomenology, he was the inventor of “existential psychoanalysis” (Dasein-analyse). See, in English, Being in the World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger, trans. Jacob Needleman (London: Souvenir, 1975).

 24. La Psychanalyse, no. 1: Sur la parole et le langage (Paris: PUF, 1956). Texts reprinted in Lacan, Écrits, pp. 369–99 and 879–87.

2. Psychoanalysis and Psychology

“Psychoanalysis and Psychology” is the title given by Louis Althusser.

 

  1.  Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1989).

  2.  Jacques Lacan, “La direction de la cure et les principes de son pouvoir,” La Psychanalyse, no. 6, reprinted in Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 623ff.

  3.  See the preface to this volume.

  4.  Cf. the preface to this volume.

  5.  Althusser is referring to a schema drawn on the blackboard.

  6.  Lucien Malson, Les Enfants sauvages (Paris: 10/18, 1964).

  7.  Cf. René Spitz, La Première année de la vie de l’enfant (Paris: PUF, 1963).

  8.  Located at no. 254 rue Saint-Jacques, this institute is now called the Institut national des jeunes sourds.

  9.  In Malson, Les Enfants sauvages, pp. 161–62.

 10. A reference to the schema drawn on the blackboard.

 11. Cf. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, rev. ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994).

 12. Revue française de la psychanalyse (July-September 1956).

 13. A literal transcript of the recording would yield approximately the following text: “The whole attempt made by Melanie Freud… by Anna Freud [laughter in the audience]. I try to go beyond my colleagues.”

 14. Anna Freud, “La contribution de la psychanalyse à la psychologie génétique,” Revue française de psychanalyse (July-September 1956): 376.

 15. Ibid., p. 371.

 16. Instead of “Melanie Klein,” which is what Althusser actually said.

 17. Cf. the preceding note.

 18. Ibid.

 19. Jacques Lacan, “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage,” La Psychanalyse l (1956): “Actes du Congrès de Rome, 26 et 27 septembre 1953” (reprinted in Écrits, pp. 237–322). Daniel Lagache’s paper is published on pages 211–20 of the same volume.

 20. The recording gives “Mélanie Freud” here.

 21. Écrits, p. 217. In “Rome Discourse,” Lacan mentions here Michaël Balint and “the slogan that he borrows from Rickman, the advent of a Two body psychology” (ibid., p. 304).

 22. The author of a Traité de psychologie published in 1750.

 23. Christian Wolff, an eighteenth-century German philosopher said to be the first to use the term psychology.

 24. Reference to a schema on the blackboard.

 25. The recording stops in the middle of the following sentence.